Resumen de Greening the grid
In a remote corner of west Texas, in the shadow of a sprawling wind farm, one of the world's largest batteries was switched on last week. Deep in oil country, the battery is at the vanguard of efforts to help renewable energy sources realize their potential and, ultimately, oust fossil fuels in the US. Built for energy giant Duke Energy by local start-up Xtreme Power, the array is the biggest and fastest battery in the world. It can store 36 megawatts of wind power and feed it to the grid over a period of just 15 minutes. The battery's job is to act as a buffer, smoothing out the supply of electricity from the 153 MW Notrees wind farm nearby. The intermittent nature of wind power means fossil fuel powered turbines often have to step in to match energy supply with demand. The battery at Notrees bridges the gap, says Haresh Kamath of the Electric Power Research Institute in Washington DC.
